Amazon Pays Record $2.5 BILLION Fine For Trapping Prime Members Into Subscriptions (#Busted)

There’s a special place in hell for Primes cancellation team… 

In case you missed it, the FTC had Jeff’s House of Commerce dead to rights on allegations that Prime’s sign-up/cancel system was designed by Satan’s UX team. The agency was three days into trial when Amazon folded, agreeing to cough up a $1B penalty plus $1.5B in refunds to roughly 35M customers who got roped into memberships they didn’t want. Translation: up to $51 a head if you were one of the schmucks who clicked too fast. Bigly.

(Source: Giphy) 

Now this is a BFD… for two parts: #1. I should be refunded some brain cells for going through this process myself… (it’s horrific). #2. It’s the second-largest FTC settlement in history… only second behind Zuck’s $5B fine over some privacy f*ckery. However, besides the perception of it all… that $2.5B is 0.1% of Amazon’s $2.4T market cap. So really, call it a slap on the wrist.

(Source: CNBC) 

With that said, Amazon, of course, admitted no wrongdoing. Mark Blafkin, their spokesperson, basically shrugged and said they’ve “always followed the law” and already fixed the issues years ago. I call B.S. And yet, three Amazon execs… including Prime boss Jamil Ghani… were staring down personal liability if a jury got involved. So what do you do if you know you’re 100% innocent and did no malicious thing? You fold… and pay. Which is why that liability  part vanished the second the settlement ink dried. Funny how fast “we’ll fight this in court” turns into “where do I wire the money?” LOL.

So what now? Well Amazon has a fat bill, barely any change in stock price, and then back to business as usual. Prime still has 200M members globally, still vacuums billions in cash, and still makes normies shop more often than they should. Meaning, Amazon isn’t sweating this… it was cheaper than letting a jury see the receipts.

(Source: Giphy) 

On the other hand, the FTC has a bigger torpedo locked in: a full-blown antitrust case accusing Amazon of using monopoly power to jack prices, degrade quality, and kneecap rivals. Trial date: 2027. By then, Bezos will either be in space permanently or running for president. Until then, congrats if you got duped into Prime. You might get $51 back. #winning. Until next time, friends… 

At the time of publishing, Stocks.News holds positions in Amazon as mentioned in the article.